Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics, this keeps Alice, the Doctor’s librarian companion from the previous two sequences, and introduces the mysterious Sapling, a young sapient tree which is at the centre of a mystery that needs to be solved. Some very good story concepts, the first half involving a weirdly stereotypically British planet and a Silent that even other Silents cannot see, and the second half involving one of Alice’s neighbours who has unaccountably become multiply duplicated. A good start. You can get it here.
It’s the classic Monty Python question; I mean what has it done for us? We all have a vague notion that it gives us the tides, but how else can a ball of rock in space help us here on Earth?
The astronomer Maggie Aderin-Pocock has been one of the presenters of the BBC astronomy TV programme The Sky at Night for ten years, following in the footsteps of Patrick Moore. I’m afraid it’s generally on too late for me to watch, but I read this book with much interest, having read Patrick Moore’s classic Guide to the Moon forty years ago.
Moving with the times, it’s a very approachable combination of autobiography, science and culture, with the second quarter of the book looking at the history of lunar observation and at literature inspired by the moon. There’s not much about the Apollo landings – you can find plenty of information about them elsewhere – but there’s a lot about the research findings of what is on and inside the Moon.
But the guts of the book are to explore the effect that the moon has on us – both culturally and scientifically. Aderin-Pocock’s approach is that curiosity about the moon is a gateway drug that may lead readers into more research on science. It’s tightly and breezily written, and recommended. You can get it here.
Tintin: We’re home again, and none too soon, either! Captain Haddock: The telephone, Nestor. (translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner)
This is one of the great Tintin albums: a simple story in which our hero and Captain Haddock go to the rescue of their friend Professor Calculus (Tournesol in the original French) who has been kidnapped by the agents of an Eastern European dictatorship. There’s lots of exciting action through the streets of Geneva and the Swiss and Balkan countrysides, with a climax in the opera house with the great Bianca Castafiore; there’s also comic relief in the form of Thompson and Thomson, the professor’s complete deafness, and the insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg (Séraphin Lampion in French) who invites himself to become Captain Haddock’s friend and house guest while he is away.
Most of the art is close up framing of our heroes, but Hergé throws in a couple of big picture panels. Here is a crown of rubberneckers gathering outside Marlinspike, to Captain Haddock’s annoyance.
Hergé has actually put himself in there at the bottom right, as the man in the crowd with a drawing pad drawing the crowd. He didn’t do that very often.
This won the Tiptree Award (now the Otherwise Award) in 2018. It’s a short book about a post-apocalypse future England, in a world where most human men have died of a gender-specific virus and the survivors live in secret reservations, while women get on with running civilisation. Our protagonist is a teenager who has no idea that men are still around; she meets a teenage boy who has fled his reservation, and finds out more about her society than she expected to. I see a lot of very unenthusiastic reviews of this book online, but I rather liked it; I think I can see what the author was trying to do. You can get it here.
The Tiptree Award shortlist included a short story, five novels and one duology. The only one I have read is An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen.
The BSFA Award that year was won by The Rift, by Nina Allan; the Clarke Award was won by Dreams Before the Start of Time, by Anne Charnock, which was also on the BSFA ballot. (I wrote both up here.) The Hugo and Nebula both went to The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin.
The following year the Tiptree Award (as it still was) went to a short story, “They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete, so that will be next in this sequence.
These two stories both won the Hugo and the Nebula in their respective categories in 1996 for work published in 1994. They are very different works, one trying to put a new gloss on an old theme and the other barely sfnal.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” is:
But the more he concentrated on those memories, the more vague and imprecise they became, and he knew they must have occurred a very long time ago. Sometimes he tried to remember the name of his tribe, but it was lost in the mists of time, as were the names of his parents and siblings.
This is an old-fashioned tale about the decline of humanity, as detected by alien anthropologists investigating a depopulated Earth; the narrator is able to sense the story of the owner of an artefact through its aura (or whatever). It turns out that the humans are not so extinct after all. Seven short stories add up to a grim big picture. I found it a somewhat moralising tale, with an original concept reaching a rather obvious conclusion. The best of the internal stories is the middle one, about a safari in the year 2103, which is also the only one explicitly about white folks from outside swooping in to look at Africa; better when you write what you know. People loved this at the time, but I feel it slightly muffs the landing, though not as badly as Resnick’s later humorous squibs.
“Forgiveness Day”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, was also on both Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novella.
Cover by George Barr for the 1994 chapbook
The second paragraph of the third section of “The Martian Child” is:
I was in Arizona, at a party at Jeff Duntemann’s sprawling house. Jeff is a two-time Hugo nominee who gave up science fiction to write books about computer programming. Apparently, it was far more profitable than science fiction; now he was publishing his own magazine, PC-Techniques. I write a regular column for the magazine, an off-the-wall mix of code and mutated zen. It was the standing joke that my contribution to the magazine was the “Martian perspective.”
This on the other hand is a story I love, even though it may not even be sfnal depending on how you read it. The author, who is not named but clearly shares many characteristics with David Gerrold, adopts a boy who has certain behavioural quirks, one of which is that he believes that he is a Martian and may have a limited ability to grant wishes. Any of us who have experienced or closely observed parenthood will sympathise with the experience of having a tiny and new personality developing right in front of you. Any child that you raise includes bits of you, but also has characteristics that seem to come from somewhere else entirely. From Mars? Why not?
Cover from Gerrold’s website, no artist given.
I was fortunate to meet with David Gerrold at SMOFCon in Santa Rosa, California, in December 2018, and we discussed this story among other topics. Here we are at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. I admit that I was a little starstruck.
“The Singular Habits of Wasps”, by Geoffrey A. Landis. and “The Matter of Seggri”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, were also on both Best Novelette ballots.
That year the Hugo for Best Novel went to Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold, and the Nebula to Moving Mars, by Greg Gear; the Hugo for Best Short Story went to “None So Blind”, by Joe Haldeman, and the Nebula to “A Defense of the Social Contracts”, by Martha Soukup.
This marks the start of a rather odd period when there was very little crossover between the Hugos and Nebulas. Normally there are a couple of joint winners every year, but between 1995 and 2001 there was only one, Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, which will be the next in this series.
Meanwhile my own copy of both stories is in the Nebula Awards 30 anthology, which you can get here.
She’d been trekking for days across the grassy plains that lay beyond the valley and the river and the settlements, but at last the ground was beginning to climb. She was sure she would find answers here.
A rather lovely Fifteenth Doctor novel, with two different sets of cute aliens in potential conflict with each other, and the Doctor and Ruby sorting out the conflict. You won’t get the same level of characterisation here as in Ruby Red, but it’s a good sfnal concept, executed in a very Whovian way. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Party Systems and Structures of Competition”, by Peter Mair):
The most conventional and frequently adopted criterion for classifying party systems is also the most simple: the number of parties in competition. Moreover, the conventional distinction involved here has also proved appealingly straightforward: that between a two-party system, on the one hand, and a multiparty (i.e., more than two) system, on the other (see Duverger 1954). Nor was this just a casual categorization; on the contrary, it was believed to tap into a more fundamental distinction between more or less stable and consensual democracies, which were those normally associated with the two-party type, as opposed to more or less unstable and conflictual democracies, which were those associated with the multiparty type. Thus, two-party systems, which were typically characteristic of the United Kingdom and the United States and invariably involved single-party government, were assumed to enhance accountability, alternation in government, and moderate, center-seeking competition. Multiparty systems, on the other hand, which usually required coalition administrations and were typically characteristic of countries such as France or Italy, prevented voters from gaining a direct voice in the formation of governments, did not necessarily facilitate alternation in government, and sometimes favored extremist, ideological confrontations between narrowly based political parties. And although this simple association of party system types and political stability and efficacy was later challenged by research into the experiences of some of the smaller European democracies, which boasted both a multiplicity of parties and a strong commitment to consensual government (e.g., Daalder 1983) and thus led some early observers to attempt to elaborate a distinction between “working” multiparty systems (e.g., the Netherlands or Sweden) and “nonworking” or “immobilist” multiparty systems (e.g., Italy), the core categorization of two-party versus multiparty has nevertheless continued to command a great deal of support within the literature on comparative politics.2 2 See, for example, Almond, Powell, and Mundt (1993, 117-20), where this traditional distinction is recast as one of “majoritarian” versus multiparty systems; see also the influential study by Lijphart (1984) where one of the key distinctions between majoritarian and consensus democracies is defined as that between a two-party system and a multiparty system.
This was another of the books that I got at the end of 2016, lost and then found again, to prepare a talk that I gave in Belfast that December. It was published in 1996, but it seems a bit dated even for 28 years ago; most of Eastern Europe was already two cycles into the new democratic system by then, and more could have been made of the test bed for democracy. In addition, there’s almost nothing about the actual subject of my talk, which was electoral boundaries. Still, I only paid £3.88 for it, so I can’t really complain.
What it does have is quite a wide range of essays picking out different aspects of the democratic process – not just the legal framework of the vote and the political party system, but also the roles of what we would now call civil society, opinion polls, media, the economy, and the impact of leadership, recruitment of candidates, and campaigning – the chapter on actual campaigning by David Farrell is probably the best in the book.
A useful snapshot of where research stood in the mid-1990s, but with massive gaps even then in the Global South. I hope that there is a more up to date volume out there. Meantime, you can get it here.
My usual system of quoting the second paragraph of the third section is always challenged by theatre scripts, and in this case there are no sections to the play at all, though there is a point where an optional interval is indicated. So I’ll just quote the most famous lines.
History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracle And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing: The utter, self-revealing Double-take of feeling. If there’s fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing The outcry and the birth-cry Of new life at its term.
These lines come at the conclusion of a grim story: the young Neoptolemus is sent by Odysseus to retrieve the bow of Philoctetes, who has been abandoned by the Greeks on the island of Lemnos. Philoctetes’ bow shoots invincible arrows, and the Greeks know that they cannot conquer Troy without it. But the only way to get it from Philoctetes is for Neoptolemus to pretend that he too has fallen out with the Greeks. Eventually a divine intervention helps to resolve the plot into a more cheerful place than seemed likely for most of the duration. (This is not a spoiler; the chorus tells us that it’s going to happen in the first speech of the play.)
It’s often difficult to appreciate a play from the script (well, difficult for me at least), but I really enjoyed this, in particular Heaney’s use of Ulster turns of phrase to give a clear voice to the characters. It’s a psychological story which can be told with minimal scenery. I’d certainly pay to see it.
Paulius has draped a robe over Kenna’s shoulders as he leads Kenna across the orchard, headed for a small frosted-glass door set into a polished aluminum wall. Kenna clutches at the white linen lapels, reveling in the feeling of clean cloth; he’s worn his filthy Inevitable Robe for so long he can no longer distinguish between the stained cloth and his squalid skin.
I used to occasionally dip into Ferrett Steinmetz’s livejournal back in the day – I remember a particularly vivid account he wrote about of having sex during a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. This was one of the books in the 2020 Hugo packet which I have only just now got around to. It is a space opera with a somewhat wacky setting. It didn’t really grab me and I gave up after a hundred pages. But you can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 41) The Combined 2001 Election, by NISRA Frontiers of the Roman Empire: The Lower German Limes, by David J. Breeze, Sonja Jill, Erik P. Graafstal, Willem J.H. Willems and Steve Bödecker Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece to Life, by Jonathan Bardon Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective, eds. Lawrence Leduc, Richard G. Niemi, Pippa Norris The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith
Poetry 2 (YTD 3) How to be Invisible: Lyrics, by Kate Bush The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney
SF 7 (YTD 54) Godkiller, by Hannah Kaner Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse (did not finish) The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz (did not finish) “The Martian Child”, by David Gerrold Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 20) The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford Caged, by Una McCormack Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Stephen Wyatt
Comics 2 (YTD 20) The Malignant Truth, by Si Spurrier et al L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé
3,700 pages (YTD 38,100) 8/20 (YTD 71/157) by non-male writers (Jill, Norris, Bush, Kaner, Roanhorse, Dean, Bergin) 2/20 (YTD 23/157) by a non-white writer (Roanhorse, Dean) 4/20 rereads (“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, “The Martian Child”, Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, L’Affaire Tournesol) 299 books currently tagged unread, down 8 from last month, down 61 from July 2023.
Reading now Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Maggie Aderin-Pocock
Coming soon (perhaps) The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: Kerblam!, by Pete McTighe Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson The Edge of Destruction, by Simon Guerrier Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis Comparing Electoral Systems, by David M. Farrell Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Desdemona and the Deep, by C. S. E. Cooney “They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton Monica, by Daniel Clowes Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy
I enjoyed it. I think RTD is rather good at the base-under-siege stories, and Lindsay Duncan, who I don’t think I had seen before, was superb as Adelaide. (Has anyone remarked on the fact that this story was headed by two Scottish actors putting on English accents?)
Many electrons have been distorted in discussion of whether the ending worked in terms of Adelaide, the Doctor, and Time. I was satisfied with Adelaide. She took agency back from the Doctor, even though it meant her own destruction; of course, she did this because she knew what her death would mean, and valued that ahead of her life.
The Doctor has now been without a regular companion since Donna left. (We also have a whole bunch of companionless Tenth Doctor books and audios released this year, for those who are prepared to take their Who outside the TV canon.) Donna told him at their first meeting that he needs someone to tell him when to stop, and that latent part of his character was made manifest in the climax of The Waters of Mars. It’s a dramatic twist to show us a flawed hero – still recognisably the same person, but seen by us (and himself) in a different way.
It topped the nominations for the 2010 Hugo in the BDPSF category by a very wide margin, and went on to win the award though in a tighter vote.
I enjoyed rewatching it as well. There aren’t all that many Doctor Who stories about space exploration, which is odd when you think about it. And I’m not always keen on the stories which show the Doctor as a flawed hero, but sometimes it works better than others, and I think this is one of those times.
Phil Ford has now written a novelisation of his own script – he had previously done the same for one of his Sarah Jane Adventures stories, and I complained then that it was not comfortably done, but I liked his Torchwood stuff (see here and here). That SJA novelisation was seventeen years ago, and he’s clearly got a lot more writing experience under his belt since then. The Waters of Mars is one of the better recent novelisations. The second paragraph of third chapter is:
He said he had been eight years old, and it was a tomato, small but perfectly round and deeply red, that he had plucked from a spindly but leafy tomato plant grown in a pot at the back of his father’s greenhouse. One side of the greenhouse was filled with tall, flourishing plants, their limbs already bowing with the weight of ripening tomatoes. The opposite side was a jungle of cucumber plants, aubergines and potted bushes of red and green chillies.
There’s a lot of juicy extra stuff here that didn’t appear in the TV story, whether because there wasn’t room for it in the original script or whether the author has imagined it more deeply when coming back to the novelisation. The characters on the Mars base are all more fully realised on the page than on the screen, and we get more into the secrets that the astronauts have discovered on planet; while the fundamental plot arc is not reinforced particularly, it isn’t weakened either. So, definitely one to look out for. You can get it here.
Second verse of third song (“Love and Anger”) as given here:
Take away the love and the anger, And a little piece of hope holding us together. Looking for a moment that’ll never happen, Living in the gap between past and future. Take away the stone and the timber, And a little piece of rope won’t hold it together.
I’m not a super-fan of Kate Bush, but I like her music well enough, and what’s interesting about this collection of her lyrics is that it’s very much curated by her – this is not a chronological order from early to modern, it’s a compilation of all of her songs to date (2018) grouped by theme. I enjoyed revisiting some old favourites, but also realised how little I know Bush’s complete œuvre, and there is clearly some good stuff that I have missed out on so far. There’s also a very nice and helpful foreword from David Mitchell (the novelist not the comedian, from context). You can get it here.
This was both the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2018, and the shortest of the unread books acquired in 2018. Next on those piles respectively are Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis, and Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait.
Wealth and comfort were assured from the moment Jennens was born in 1700 at Gopsall in Leicestershire. At that stage his father was overseeing the production of over 2,000 tons of cast iron a year. The Darbys of Coalbrookdale had discovered the art of smelting ore with coke, but they kept this knowledge to themselves: until the middle of the eighteenth century charcoal was the only fuel that could then produce metal of a quality acceptable to all other ironmasters. Prodigious quantities of wood for charcoal burning were needed to feed the industry now burgeoning in the English west midlands. For a time timber felled in the broadleaved forests of Ireland, shipped across the Irish Sea, had met the requirements of a great many English smelters. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, these forests were no more – heedless exploitation had left Ireland, apart from Iceland, the most treeless country in Europe. Jennens’s father, also called Charles, had been assiduously buying up suitably wooded land still remaining in England and Wales to ensure a steady supply for his business: when he died in 1747, his son inherited 736 acres at Gopsall and no fewer than 33 other properties in 6 different counties.1 1 McCracken, 1971, pp29 and 83-84; Smith, 2012, p.3
Jonathan Bardon (who died of COVID in 2020) was one of the great Irish historians, and this was his last monograph, published in 2015. It is a lovely micro-study of the before, during and after of the evening of 13 April 1742, when Handel’s Messiah was first performed in Dublin at the long-vanished music hall on Fishamble Street
He carefully unpicks the cultural background to the performance, with Dublin, feeling that it was not punching its cultural weight as a city, eager to find openings where it could score over London. He also looks at the stories of the other people involved with the show – librettist Charles Jennens (who submitted it to Handel unsolicited); leading soprano Susannah Cibber, sister of Thomas “Rule Britannia” Arne; and Jonathan Swift, whose grumpy authority over the choristers of St Patrick’s Cathedral almost derailed the entire performance at the last minute.
And he goes into the subsequent history of Messiah, which was actually rather slow to catch on in the English-speaking world. Interestingly it was the Methodists who first picked up on it, and then it became a staple for large-scale musical spectacle starting with a performance in Westminster Abbey in 1784 to commemorate the centenary of Handel’s birth. (He was actually born in 1685, but never mind.)
So, it’s a nice study of a particular cultural event which will tell people who know about Irish history some interesting things about music, and will tell people who know about music history some interesting things about Ireland. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next is Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman.
She had been bored with her cabin on the Newton, which was cramped and utilitarian. She had moved to the ship’s small common lounge until she had become bored with that. Finally she had taken to pacing the ship’s main corridors with a scowl disfiguring her fine features, until it seemed she reached a state of total dissatisfaction with every deckplate and bulkhead door.
Working through my backlog of unblogged Doctor Who novels brings me to this story of the Fifth Doctor, Peri and Kamelion, and a quest narrative with a host of competing quirky teams and a prize at the end that turns out to be more symbolic than valuable. I’ll be honest, I didn’t care for it much; the plot has been done better elsewhere in both Who novels and other media (The Ghost Monument comes to mind), and there were some very annoying typos – “Van Gough” was the one that grated most. The only one of Bulis’ Doctor Who books that I really liked was The Eye of the Giant. But you can get The Ultimate Treasure here.
Next in this sequence: Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks.
Some humans had sexual fantasies in their nightly visions, or nightmares about going to job interviews naked. Her dream was neither, though it had elements of both.
Hugo voting has closed now, and anyway this wasn’t directly a finalist though it was in the Voter Pack as supporting material for the author’s presence on the Astounding Award ballot. I hugely enjoyed it – a story of a vampiric race in today’s Britain, who survive by eating books and brains, and where one plucky young woman plans to overturn the whole order of her repressive society and get to grips with the outside world. Tremendous internal politics and imagination. Great stuff. You can get it here.
Someone lifted Serapio’s head, and liquid touched his lips.
In personal news, I am taking six weeks off work, starting today, a kind of mini-sabbatical (I’ve been at my current job for almost exactly ten years) and one of my resolutions is to spend less effort on books that don’t manage to grab me in the first 100 pages or so. This is one of those books, sadly; a perfectly decent fantasy novel, middle book of a trilogy, world based on pre-1492 Americas, but the setting and characters just didn’t quite engage me enough to keep reading. One of the books that I had put aside from last year’s Clarke submissions list because it clearly wasn’t science fiction but also clearly wasn’t bad. But it just wasn’t for me. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo.
The man who did the most to define the edges of the Roman state was its first emperor, Augustus (27 BC-AD 14). Towards the turn of the Era he completed the conquest of the Alps and Spain, defined the eastern boundary by treaty with the Parthians, sent expeditions up the Nile and into the Sahara Desert, and brought Roman arms to the Danube and the Elbe. He famously gave advice to keep the empire within its present boundaries; advice conspicuously ignored by many of his successors, though their achievements were much less than his.
De man die het meest heeft gedaan voor het vastleggen van de grenzen van het Romeinse Rijk was de eerste keizer, Augustus, die regerrede van 27 voor tot 14 na Christus. Rondom het begin van de jaartelling had hij de Alpen en Spanje veroverd, legde hij de grens in het oosten vast door en verdrag met de Parthnen, zond expedities naar de Nijl en de Sahara and trok hij militair op naar de Donau en de Elbe. Het is bekend dat hij adviseerde het rijk binnen deze grenzen te houden. Dit advies is door veel van zijn opvolgers in de wind geslagen, hoewel zij op minder successen konden bogen dan hij.
Der Mann, der am meisten für die Festlegung der Grenzen des römischen Staates getan hat, war der erste Kaiser, Augustus (27 v.-14 n. Chr.) Um die Zeitenwende schloss er die Eroberung der Alpen und Spaniens ab, bestimmte in einem Vertrag mit den Parthern die Ostgrenze, sandte Expeditionen auf den Nil und in die Sahara und brachte römische Heere and die Donau und die Elbe. Er ist berühmt für seinen letzten Rat, das Reich innerhalb der damaligen Grenzen zu halten; einen Rat, den viele seiner Nachfolger offenkundig ignorierten, obwohl ihre Leistungen viel geringer waren als seine.
This is a lovely wee book, produced by the team publicising the recent recognition by UNESCO of the Roman frontier on the lower Rhine as a World Heritage Site. It is lavishly illustrated with photos, charts and maps of the Roman Empire’s frontiers, not only of the lower Rhine but also from Hadrian’s Wall, the Sahara and everywhere in between. The text is in three languages, all impressively squeezed together to fit the photographs.
The authors make the points that the Roman frontier on the Lower Rhine stayed pretty much in the same place for the lifespan of the Empire, and that the soil and social conditions have allowed a lot of archaeological sites to remain in a good state of preservation. I picked up a hard copy of the book at the summer party held by the Brussels office of North Rhineland-Westphalia, which is in the same building as my own workplace, but you can download it for free here.
The one photo that particularly grabbed me was not from Germany or the Netherlands, but from England, the “Staffordshire Pan“, a copper bowl which appears to be a Roman-era souvenir of Hadrian’s Wall. It is decorated with mock Celtic motifs and has the names of the four westernmost forts on the Wall written below the rim, along with the name ‘Aelius Draco’, who might have been the maker or (I think more likely) the person for whom it was commissioned. Originally there would have been a handle, though it looks too beautiful to actually cook with. It was found in Staffordshire in 2003 and is now on display in Carlisle.
There’s a lot thrown in here: the Doctor, the new comics companions Alice and the Quire, Abslom Daak the Dalek hunter, River Song, the War Doctor, an unexpected incarnation of the Master, and a complex storyline told over the previous two volumes and concluded here. I didn’t think it was quite as good as the middle volume, but I came away satisfied anyway. You can get it here.
Bread was a living thing: pleasant and true to itself. The warmth of the oven, open to release some heat, breathed on his cheeks, stirring the yeast-dusted air to life. It was the end of a brisk spring day, and his bakery in the western lowlands of Middren had made good coin.
One of the novels in the Astounding Award folder of this year’s Hugo packet. A secondary world fantasy with some interesting wrinkles – one of the protagonists has a prosthetic leg, another has a secret career as a baker. Gods and magic and stuff. It is enjoyable enough but I’m coming to the realisation that when I’m not really enjoying a fantasy like this, I should just put it aside. Anyway, you can get it here.
A total of 926 respondents completed and returned the presiding officer questionnaire in the pre-paid envelope provided. This represented a response rate of 77%.
I picked this up remaindered in a Belfast bookshop, with hopes from the title: The Combined Election: an analysis of the combined Parliamentary and District Council elections in Northern Ireland on 7th June 2001, by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. I had expected some statistical and in depth analysis of the actual election results – the Westminster and local government elections were held simultaneously that year, with two different electoral systems, Westminster using the primitive first-past-the-post system and the Northern Irish local councils elected by Single Transferable Vote.
In fact the book is not an analysis of the election results, but of a survey carried out among the general public, polling staff and polling station presiding officers, basically asking what went right, what went wrong and how things could be done better in future. The conclusions are that there are things that could be done better and things that don’t need to be changed. I have to say it was not as exciting as I had hoped! It’s well out of print, so you can’t get it unless you look very hard.
This was the shortest unread book acquired in 2018 on my shelves. Next on that pile is How to be Invisible: Lyrics, by Kate Bush.
Outside this trim anonymity was a piece of wasteland, once an Officers’ Training Camp, where there was a semi-circle of battered Nissen huts on splitting tarmac; through long cracks in the surface willowherb and groundsel poked weak, tenacious stems. There was no flagpole in the concrete slot: no cars in the designated car park: the place appeared, not recently, to have undergone a successful siege. The huts let out, through dangling doors, a strong smell of stale urine. In one, a long row of basins and urinals had been deliberately shattered and fouled. The regulars, Alexander saw, were there. A circle of grubby boys lifted their heads from the cupped glow of matches as he passed. In a doorway a gaggle of girls whispered and shrilled, leaning together, arm in arm. The largest, skinny and provocative, thirteen maybe, stared boldly. She wore a drooping flowered dress in artificial silk, and a startling red latticed snood. A cigarette stub glowed and faded in one corner of her pointed mouth. Alexander made a rushed and incompetent gesture of salutation. He imagined they knew very well why he, why anyone, went there.
I see a lot of online reviews complaining that this book is dense and incomprehensible. I loved it actually. It’s the story of Frederica Potter, turning 18 in the summer of 1953, and her crazy academic family and the English town where they live. A lot of it is about a pageant celebrating the life of Elizabeth I, with the coronation of Elizabeth II running in the background. A lot of it is about sex and love. There are some vivid set-pieces, and some well observed bits of humanity. I found Frederica’s father, dominant in his own family until his children grow up and away from him, a particularly interesting character.
This is the first of four books in a sequence, and I read and really didn’t enjoy the fourth Babel Tower, when I was living in Bosnia in 1997. I wonder if it would have made more sense if I had read the previous three? I’m certainly willing to give it a try.
When I first listened to the audio of this lost story, with linking dialogue read by Peter Purves, in 2007, I wrote:
The Myth Makers was the four-part story between the single-episode, Doctor-less Mission to the Unknown and the twelve-part epic The Daleks’ Master Plan, bringing the First Doctor, Steven and Vicki to ancient Troy. Vicki here becomes the second regular to be written out after developing a love interest; the Doctor is mistaken for Zeus and helps Odysseus construct the wooden horse, though is somewhat obsessed with its fetlocks “no safety margin at all… if only you would have allowed me another day to fit shock absorbers!”
I liked the creative reinterpretation of the characters from the Greek legend. Priam takes a shine to Vicki, renames her Cressida and won’t hear a word against her. Both Paris and Menelaus are incompetent, the former a coward and the latter drunk, making one wonder what Helen ever saw in either of them. (Menelaus: “I was heartily glad to see the back of her!” Paris: “I think this whole business has been carried just a little bit too far. I mean, that Helen thing was just a misunderstanding.”) Helen herself never appears in person, the BBC beauty budget presumably not reaching that far. The interpretation of the story that will always remain with me, I think, is Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy, but this will do as an sfnal version.
As with all the “lost” stories, one never knows what one missed, though I can make a couple of guesses – Frances White (Julia in I CLAVDIVS) as Cassandra, or Vicki in her dress. But Peter Purves’ narration is, as ever, great, even though of the three regular characters his has the least to do. We end with a real acceleration of pace towards the next story; Vicki and the Doctor say their goodbyes off-screen, while Cassandra’s handmaiden Katarina accompanies a wounded Steven aboard the Tardis as a new (but very short-lived) companion.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2010, I watched the Loose Cannon reconstruction and wrote:
The first three episodes of The Myth Makers are tremendous fun, rather in the spirit of Carry On Cleo which came out a few months earlier. The switch to epic drama and tragedy in the last episode is rather effective and sets the tone for the next story better than I had remembered. Donald Cotton presumes that the audience will have sufficient familiarity with the Trojan legends to appreciate the paradox of the various heroes being vain, cowardly, stupid, greedy or alcoholic.
I wonder also if he deliberately reversed the events of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where Cressida leaves Troilus for Diomede rather than the other way round. I know that the received wisdom is against me on this, but mention two further, admittedly weak, hints at a deberate reversal: Vicki arrives in Troy while Shakespeare’s Cressida leaves the city; and Hector is killed at the end of the Shakespeare play but the beginning of the Who story. Also, though this may not count, Troilus kills Achilles here, whereas Shakespeare has Achilles triumphant and alive at the end.
The lore is that Hartnell was in bad form while this was being made, but he seems to me to greatly enjoy his banter with Ivor Salter as Odysseus. Mind you, I felt a bit sad when I realised that John Wiles’ name had replaced Verity Lambert’s in the credits, and I am sure Hartnell must have started wondering how much longer he would last as the sole survivor of the original cast and crew. (Another year, as it turned out.)
Watching the reconstruction again, the striking thing is how little the Doctor and companions do; Vicki and Stephen spend most of the story imprisoned, and the Doctor just does the horse (though admittedly that’s a big part of the plot). I did like the dynamics among the Trojan ruling family. Barrie Ingham, who plays Paris, had also just played Alydon in the first Peter Cushing film, Dr Who and the Daleks. You can find the recon online, and get the Purves narration here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Donald Cotton’s novelisation of his own script, written twenty years after it was broadcast, is:
Mind you, we Greeks are constantly expecting the materialisation of some god or other, agog to intervene in human affairs. Well, no – to be honest – not really expecting. Put it this way, our religious education has prepared us to accept it, should it occur. But that is by no means to say we anticipate it as a common phenomenon. It’s the sort of thing that happens to other people, perhaps; but hardly before one’s own eyes in the middle of everyday affairs, such as the present formalistic blood-letting. Certainly not. No – but, as I say, the church has warned us of the possibility, however remote.
When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:
Once again, Cotton produces a memorable Who novel through a first person narrative: this time he has the poet Homer telling the story of how he witnessed the Doctor and friends interfering with the outcome of the siege of Troy. Homer didn’t appear at all in the story as broadcast (though Cotton has him absorb the silent role of the Cyclops played by Tutte Lemkow); constricting the whole narrative to a single viewpoint character does create some difficulties in telling the story, but basically it is a really good story anyway, and while it’s not Cotton at the utter peak of his form, it is surely one of the top ten novelisations. Cotton has taken the opportunity to restore as chapter titles some of the punning episode titles scrapped by the production team (eg “Doctor in the Horse”).
Coming back to it now, I still very much enjoyed it, including the anachronistic asides, especially as I have read a few more novels loosely based on the period, and also recently read the Wilson translation of the Odyssey. You can get it here.
Before I get onto Ian Potter’s Black Archive, which (spoiler) is one of the best in the series, I have been doing a little research myself into the BBC’s previous treatments of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The first broadcast version was on the National [radio] Programme in 1935, and a couple of names leap out, most notably that Menelaus was played by Francis De Wolff, who would play Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon on Doctor Who thirty years later. It was an early break for Jack Hawkins and Anthony Quayle as well.
Francis De Wolff was in another radio production on the Third Programme in 1946, this time playing Ajax, and here Pandarus was played by Max Adrian, who of course was Priam in Doctor Who. Other Whovian names that jumped out at me were Valentine Dyall as Hector, Leonard Sachs as Paris and Laurence Payne as Troilus. Cresside was played by Belle Chrystall.
Belle Chrystall and Valentine Dyall returned in the same roles for a 1952 Third Programme production, in which Troilus was played by Marius Goring. Grizelda Hervey, who had been Helen in 1946, was Cassandra this time.
The first TV version in 1954 featured Donald Eccles as Priam, eighteen years before he played the High priest of Atlantis on Doctor Who. John Fraser was Troilus, Geoffrey Toone was Achilles, and Timothy Bateson and James Culliford also had small parts.
Familiar names again in a Third Programme production in 1959, with Francis de Wolff returning as Ajax and Valentine Dyall as Hector; Achilles is Trevor Martin, who much later played the Doctor on stage.
Another Third Programme production in 1964 is very star heavy – no crossover with The Myth Makers this time, but many actors who went on to star in Who, with Michael Kilgarriff doing the prologue and Margarelon, Julian Glover playing Hector, Stephen Thorne as Aeneas, Cyril Cusack as Pandarus, Maurice Denham as Ulysses and Peter Pratt as Ajax.
A televised National Youth Theatre production in 1966, a year after The Myth Makers, featured a young Timothy Dalton as Diomedes and also Derek Seaton, later to play Hilred in The Deadly Assassin, as Ulysses. The director was Bernard Hepton who went on to star in Secret Army.
Most entertaining of all, The Listener‘s review of a Radio 3 production in 1980 tells us that “Maureen O’Brien beautifully played Cressida as a squeaky sex kitten – a wanton from the start, with come-hitherish inflections.” Other familiar names include Gabriel Woolf as Agamemnon, Sheila Grant as Cassandra and Terence Hardiman as Hector.
The only production since then is a 2005 Radio 3 version, where the only Who-related name I spotted was Toby Jones as Thersites.
In the 47 years between 1935 and 1981 there were seven BBC radio productions and two on TV of Troilus and Cressida, not to mention several productions of William Walton’s opera which I have not listed above. In the 43 years since 1981, there has been just one.
There are two points that occur to me from this. One is that obviously expectations of how much Shakespeare you should expect to get on the BBC have shifted quite a lot since 1965. The other is that viewers of The Myth Makers when it was broadcast would have had a much better background knowledge of the Troilus and Cressida story than most viewers today.
Ian Potter’s Black Archive monograph is unashamedly longer than usual, but (spoiler) one of the best Black Archives I’ve read recently. He begins with a short note on the spelling of character names, and then a prologue explaining the good and bad points of the story (highlights – Good: it’s funny; Bad: it screws up Vicki’s departure).
The very brief first chapter, “Foundational Myths”, briefly surveys the limited archaeological evidence for Troy, a metaphor (this is not stated) for the limited evidence we have about the lost Doctor Who story.
The second chapter, “Source Texts”, looks at the Iliad and Troilus and Cressida, and frames an argument for how and why The Myth Makers differs from both.
The third chapter, “The Engaging Mr Cotton”, looks in great detail at the life and career of Donald Cotton, who wrote The Myth Makers. He wrote a lot for stage, and had written several previous treatments of Greek myth. He had a complex love life as well. (The only mistake I’ve spotted by Potter is in the name of Cotton’s protégée towards the end of his career – it was Tamsin Hickling, not Tamsin Wickling.) Its third paragraph is:
Donald Henry Cotton was born near3 Nottingham on 26 April 1928, the son of Professor Harry Cotton, the distinguished and respected head of Electrical Engineering at Nottingham University and a mother described by Cotton’s wife Hilary Wright as `neurotic and over possessive’4. According to Wright, Cotton’s father, while a popular and gregarious figure, was stand-offish with his son, and the boy seems to have grown up a solitary, guarded child. Cotton went to the local Southwell Minster Grammar School, a school which, having historically trained boy choristers, retained a strong music tradition. Reading his school’s annual magazine, Cotton seems to have made no special impact during his time there, unlike his father, who as the school’s governor regularly appears in its pages. 3 According to Cotton’s 1969 biography in the programme of My Dear Gilbert at the Worthing Connaught Theatre. His father’s address is given as Mapperley Street in Nottingham in the mid-193os, but local press places him in Gunthorpe, a small village near Nottingham, in 1952, so this may well be where Cotton grew up. 4 Testro, Lucas, ‘Man Out of Time’, DWM #58i, p25. More detail on Professor Cotton’s career can be found in Crewe, ME, ‘The Met Office Grows Up: In War and Peace’.
The fourth chapter “The Unravelling Texts”, is one of the longest I’ve seen in any Black Archive. Potter takes the extant versions of the script and traces its development from Cotton’s original hand-written notes to camera script and screen. This can be done badly or well, and here it is done very well. The most interesting conclusion (of many interesting points) is that Donald Tosh, the script editor, rewrote most of the fourth episode to take account of Vicki’s departure and the installation of Katarina as the new companion.
The fifth chapter, “What Did It Look Like?”, considers the limited evidence available, and also the reputation of director Michael Leeston-Smith, concluding that the horse itself must have been a fine thing.
The sixth chapter, “The Many Wiles”, is also long by Black Archive standards, and examines in detail the career of Doctor Who’s second producer after Verity Lambert, John Wiles. I have often given my view that the Wiles period showed a road not taken, a grittier show where companions might die and comedy mixed with tragedy, not so very different from New Who in fact. Wiles was South African, left in protest at apartheid, crashed out of his first big TV job (Doctor Who), and continued a career as a minor theatre writer and novelist. Potter has gone deeply into Wiles’ body of work, and emerged with a fascinating picture of the man, which would have been worth the cover price of this Black Archive on its own. In particular, he addresses Wiles’ attitude to racism (where he finds little case to answer) and underage sex (where the evidence is more troubling). But the crucial point is that Wiles mishandled the writing out of Maureen O’Brien and lost the confidence of William Hartnell, who was then able to get him fired (though he seems to have jumped before he was pushed).
An epilogue apologises (quite unnecessarily in my view) for the length of the book.
As I said up front, this is a standout in the usually very good Black Archive series, and you can get it here.
Next: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith (and Stephen Wyatt).
Third paragraph (there are no separate sections in this 169 page book):
The works are lost, but the author remains. The most wonderful and the most woeful, tragediographic and tragic.
(English translateion by Robert Wilton)
I got this last month when the author launched it at a Kosovo Embassy event in Brussels, a short novel that was declared Kosovo’s Novel of the Year in 2020. It’s a quick but tough read, written in something of a stream-of-consciousness style, linking the stories of two women who lost most of their families in the 1999 conflict with the ancient Greek myths, most notably the story of Niobe as told in the lost play by Aeschylus (and Lemonnier’s 1772 vision of that story graces the front cover). The descriptions of the violence done to civilians by Serbian police and paramilitaries are visceral and vivid, and unapologetically (and rightly) one-sided. It takes a bit of patience to follow the twists between the interlinked stories, but I felt that my patience was rewarded. You can get it here.
When Planet of the Ood was first broadcast in 2008, I wrote:
Russell T Davies was 15 months old when the first episode of The Sensorites was broadcast in June 1964, but it obviously made a deep impression on him – we had two explicit references to Susan’s description of her and the Doctor’s home planet last season, and now we have it confirmed that the Ood are close neighbours to the Sense-Sphere. I think The Sensorites is positively the worst First Doctor story, so to me it is a slightly weird choice, but I’m aware that this is not a universal view.
[My brother] pointed out at the time that evolving to the stage where you have to carry part of your own brain around in your hand doesn’t seem terribly viable. But that apart, I thought that the music was great, the parable about slavery and society decent enough, and Tim McInerny’s performance (and also Ayesha Dharker’s) really excellent.
I rewatched it prior to tackling the recently published novelisation, and I didn’t like it quite as much as the first time. The heavily armed guards seem to have considerable difficulty in hitting the unarmed Ood, and the company’s OpSec in general is pretty poor. But the chemistry between the various actors is good, and of course now we know that there is foreshadowing of the Tenth Doctor’s approaching end.
I noted that one of the reps is played by Tariq Jordan, the brother of Yasmin Paige of the Sarah Jane Adventures.
It seems to me an odd choice of episode to put into book form, given the wide range of available choices, but I guess that when it was published a year ago the BBC were going back to the Ten/Donna pairing in anticipation of the Fourteenth Doctor stories.
The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
A powerful, cutting wind whipped and howled around her, and her lungs hurt every time she inhaled. It was so cold. And it was snowing. Giant icy flakes settled on her cheeks and eyes, burning her skin with their sharp coldness. She wrapped her arms around herself and stomped her feet to stay warm.
It’s a perfectly serviceable novelisation, stretching the story a little bit and giving a bit more depth to the characters and even bringing in a new one (a senior rep). If you liked the TV story you’ll like this, and if you were not so keen on it, it won’t change your feelings. You can get it here.
I’m working through the new novelisations as they come to my attention; looking forward to the ones to be published this summer, but otherwise the next will be The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford.
“Maybe someone in the suburbs has an electric tiller they’d trade,” Lem said. We’d started tearing up yards with spades, and it was slow going, although at least we weren’t putting buried utility lines at risk.
I AM AI by Ai Jiang
Second paragraph of third section:
Atop the entrance of the café are the flickering neon aqua letters of Mao Tou Ying and the wired image of an orange owl sitting on top of “Tou” as though perched on a tree, the wavering colour making it seem like it’s on fire. Sometimes only the “Ying” is lit, and without the tonal accent, no one can tell whether it is the “ying” in owl or the “ying” in shadow. Ironically, both fit the establishment.
荧光绿色的“Mao Tou Ying”在咖啡店入口上方闪烁，一只紧张不安的橙色猫头鹰踩着“Tou”，仿佛栖息在树上，摇曳的色彩令它看似在燃烧。有时候只有“Ying”被点亮，没有声调，没人能区分它表示猫头鹰的鹰还是阴影的影。讽刺的是，二者都挺适合这家店铺。
“Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition”, Gu Shi
Third paragraph of original Chinese text, with English translation by Emily Jin:
这次改变人类生死观和时间观的革命，只用了三十多年就完成了，现在想来真是令人觉得不可思议。其间当然会有种种议论的声音，反对者、甚至是以恐怖行径来威胁的人，亦为数不少。尤其是当冬眠技术不再是一个问题，其安全性也不再令人怀疑之后，反对的声浪却愈演愈烈，几乎上升到宗教和哲学的层面。当然如今回头去看，这些人不过是各说各话罢了，To be or not to be ,这是一个问题，却永远不会有统一的答案。本书最为可贵之处，就在于作者采用了中立、客观的立场，在对“冬眠”这一议题进行了长期追踪后，她找出那些最关键的、足以改变历史方向的人物，和最特殊的、让人深入思考的案例，再平和地向读者展示出来。
It’s incredible that three mere decades were enough for the revolution that reshaped the human perception of life, death, and time. Just like every other revolution, the cryosleep revolution was a hotbed of controversies. Heated debates, opposing voices, terrorists that threatened to end the cryosleep project with violence . . . the war of values only became more heated when the reliability of cryosleep technology and relevant safety measures were no longer questioned by the public. Challengers took the discussion to the level of religion and philosophy. Of course, looking back, most of the debates were merely pundits babbling to their respective echo chamber. To be or not to be is a question impossible to elicit a uniform answer. Therefore, in my humble opinion, the greatest achievement of this book is that the author maintains an impartial stance. Industriously tracking the topic of cryosleep through a series of interviews conducted over an extended period; she pinpoints the most crucial figures who had altered the course of history and the most exceptional and thought-provoking case studies. Then, she delivers the information and her analysis to her readers with a voice that’s objective and calm.
“On the Fox Roads” by Nghi Vo
Second paragraph of section III:
Driving one-handed, Jack skimmed out of his jacket and passed it back to me. I wrapped his jacket thick around my arm and knocked out the shards of glass from the frame, pushing them out onto the road behind us where they glittered briefly before they were lost to the darkness.
Second paragraph of “Third Court” in If Found, Return to Hell:
Oh, absolutely,” Nathaniel says. She snaps one last photo of the talisman, then pulls out a small, glass orb.
Second paragraph of Chapter Three of The Death I Gave Him:
There had been a murder.
Two short pieces in the Hugo Packet by Astounding finalist Em X. Liu. If Found, Return to Hell is a tale of an intern in a wizardly call centre who gets sucked into one particular client’s problems; you can get it here. The Death I Gave Him is a retelling of Hamlet as a murder in a family-run technology company; you can get it here. I enjoyed them both.
‘Ordinarily, no,’ agreed the Doctor. He regarded Nyssa with a look of consternation. ‘But in this case, I think it could be something rather extraordinary. Tell me about the dream again.’
Back at the start of the 2010s, I read through all of the New Adventures, Missing Adventures, Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures at the rate of two or three a month, and wrote them up here as I went – except that at the end of 2014 and the first part of 2015, I was so overwhelmed with Arthur C. Clarke Award reading and other things that I just never got around to blogging them. So I’m going back to the missing entries now, in order of internal chronology, and that means starting with this novel of the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa, set immediately after Arc of Infinity.
Trevor Baxendale is usually reliable as a Who writer (see in particular The Janus Conjunction and Prisoner of the Daleks), and I think this is one of his better books too. The TARDIS lands on a moon where the team encounters a crew of archaeologists (or are they?) and an ancient evil is unleashed from the depths. Lots of very creepy description and good characterisation, and a couple of welcome shout-outs to Old Who. A good start to this mini-project. You can get it here.
Next up: The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis.
A novella by one of this year’s Astounding finalists, which didn’t make its way into the Hugo packet but which I picked up on spec at the Lovecraft Arts and Sciences bookstore in Providence last December. It’s short and powerful, an examination of grief as augmented by near-future technology, and the different ways that there are of coming to terms with loss. My copy has several very short stories at the end and a foreword by Yi Izzy Yu. You can get it here.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ran. ‘I didn’t expect them to come after me.’
One of my disappointments about the Chibnall era of Doctor Who is that there was so little good quality spinoff material apart from the TV show itself. By contrast, Russell T. Davies has hit the ground running as usual, with one novelisation out already and another three coming later in the year, as well as two spinoff novels last month and another scheduled for November.
This is the first of the spinoff novels, taking the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby to an obscure part of European history, the Battle on the Ice in 1242, fought between Russians and Estonians (to use anachronistic and brutal shorthand) on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus. My extensive and detailed research suggests that this is the only Who story in any medium which has an Estonian setting.
Being a Doctor Who story, there are of course external incursions into the real history of what happened – three interstellar Valkyrie sisters, managing a rite of passage for the youngest of them, and an alien hive mind under the ice. On top of that the TARDIS is behaving oddly, in a foreshadowing of what we found out about its extra passenger in the recent season finale.
These sfnal trimmings are also the basis for much banter between the Doctor and Ruby, and that of course is what people will buy the book for. Given that it’s Cook’s first novel, and it must have been written before any of the recent season was shown, she catches Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor really well. The plot doesn’t gel completely perfectly (the climax in particular is lower-key than I had anticipated) but it’s a good start to the new era on paper. You can get it here.
